Hardware issue on 1 000 000 mail a day

[Ugo Bellavance]

-----Message d'origine-----
De : Egil Fujikawa Nes - Webdeal AS [mailto:egil at WEBDEAL.NO]
Envoyé : 31 mars, 2004 22:49
À : MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Objet : Hardware issue on 1 000 000 mail a day


Hi
 
We are planning to buy new hardware to our Mailscanner system. Today we have two P4 2,2 GHz with 512 MB memory and normal 200 GB IDE harddisk drives. We are only running Mailscanner with all the modules and F-prot antivirus on these servers. Normally we handle 25 to 35 k with mails everyday without any problem. The servers are located on two different locations in Norway and host around 1000 domains together. It is 500 with each server as primary MX and the other as secondary. This system is working very well, if one server is down the other one is taking all the mail and normally it is not more then 4.00 in load on the server and 2 minute mail queue. We are running everything on FreeBSD 5.2 and Postfix.
 
What we have seen more and more often is that we (or our customers) are getting flooded by spam. Yesterday we got almost 1 000 000 spam messages from more then 50 000 IP addresses. This is a big problem and our servers are working and working but it take long time to process everything. We normally stop mail with header_check in postfix when this happen, but this time we know that it also was coming was very important for the customer so we couldn't stop all the mail for this domain buy header_check.
 
Lately we have been using many Dual AMD Optiron servers that works very well on many things, but we have also some problems with some applications like frontpage extension and some PHP accelerators. Have any body experience with FreeBSD and Mailscanner on amd64 systems ? And where should we put the money on the hardware. Disk, memory or CPU ? I'm interested to hear from other that face the same problem, how do you solve it ?

<UB>
Please avoid HTML in posts, use plain-text.

You probably lack memory.  512 MB is very low with your volume  It probably begins swapping.  Memory is the first thing to put money in with MailScanner.  Julian got 1.4 Million messages/day on a dual 2.4 Xeon with 2 GB RAM. I invite you to read the MAQ I'm working on right now, (www.routier.org/ms.htm), especially the section on optimisation http://www.routier.org/ms.htm#optimize.

</UB> 

Best regards
Egil Fujikawa Nes

WebDeal AS - Teknologiveien 22 - 2815 Gjøvik - NORWAY

Phone: +47 61 13 16 50 - Fax: +47 61 13 16 51
E-mail: post at webdeal.no - URL: www.webdeal.no